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The next time you're at an MSU football game sipping hot cocoa and watching the scoreboard light up with touchdowns, consider this: Spartan Stadium consumes enough electricity each month during the season to power 225 average households for the same period. And that demand has environmental consequences. The annual electricity demand by the stadium results in the burning of 480,000 pounds of coal, Eric Thomas, an MSU engineering graduate student, calculated for this project. While that coal supplies electricity to the stadium, during a month of the football season it also produces enough heat to warm one dorm of the Brody complex for a month, said Rick Johnson, an electrical engineer at the MSU power plant. Burning that coal creates problems. Michigan State University's P.T. Simon Power Plant emitted more than 1,729 tons of nitrogen oxide, 3,545 tons of sulfur dioxide and almost a ton of lead into the air in 2001, according to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality data. Of course, powering the stadium is just one of many demands on the plant. It’s difficult to know just how much pollution the marginal demand by football contributes to the university-wide demand. For one thing, the stadium houses the university’s transportation department which includes a car washing and maintenance operation. That facility consumes much of the energy sent to the stadium, said Robert Ellerhorst, director of utilities and waste management at MSU. That's one reason there continues to be electric demand in the off season. Still, months with home football games do show an increase in power use. With dozens of harmful substances ranging from arsenic to uranium released when burning coal, the road to cleaning up stack emissions has been a hazy one. Four substances released by burning coal that are especially harmful are carbon-dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury, said David Gard, an energy policy specialist at the Michigan Environmental Council, a statewide coalition of environmental groups. Carbon dioxide is a common greenhouse gas that can trap heat from the sun and earth in the atmosphere and increase the global temperatures. Nitrogen oxide helps create smog and increases respiratory health problems. Sulfur dioxide causes acid rain. And mercury settles in aquatic life that, when eaten, can cause neurological brain damage to developing children and be passed on to fetuses of expectant mothers. "Every Michigan lake is currently under a mercury contamination advisory," Gard said. The Environmental Protection Agency calls coal-burning power plants the single biggest contributor to mercury pollution in the United States. With air quality under fire, the EPA has found different ways to regulate toxic stack emissions from coal plants. |
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Keeping pollution and emission rates low comes down to a kind of utility stock market, said Nick Burwell, an environmental analyst for Lansing's Board of Water and Light. If a cleaner power plant is not filling its pollution quota, it can sell that unused quota to an older, less efficient plant. The purchase lets the older plant continue to operate legally, but the process is designed to keep the overall national air pollution at or below a certain level. One way the Lansing power plant remains below the national pollution standard is by buying a more expensive, cleaner coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana, Burwell said. The Wyoming coal is a fuel source with about 30 percent less energy per pound, but with has substantially lower sulfur content, he said. The MSU plant buys about 240 tons of coal a year from the Appalachian region known for having higher sulfur content. "There are three piles of coal on our floor," Ellerhorst said. The assortment of clean and dirty coal varies between the piles because the plant has different boiler systems to burn the coal. For instance, the cheaper, dirtier coal is burned in the newer boiler which results in less pollution than the cleaner coal in the older boilers, Ellerhorst said. Either way the Simon Plant stays under the regulated amount. Certain technologies have been added to the plant like bag house cleaners - giant vacuums on smoke stacks that catch some of the pollutants. Other improvements include a nitrogen-oxide reduction unit applied this year to stacks to cut the amount of nitrogen-oxide as much as 70 percent, Ellerhorst said. A federal limit has not yet been set on sulfur emissions, so there are no forces obligating the plant to move to a more expensive coal, he said. Another cloud over the plant is the issue of being an old system. Three out of the four MSU boilers are allowed to operate under older regulations. |
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In the 1970s, the EPA tightened regulations on new coal-burning facilities, while the older, "grandfathered" facilities slipped through the cracks, Gard said. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration, the Justice Department and the EPA were ready to sue grandfathered plants because the upgrades required to reduce pollution were insufficient. In 2000, most of the lawsuits were dropped. Despite the grandfathering issue, MSU does score an A plus on coal efficiency. "We use cogeneration in which we burn coal to create steam for heating in buildings," said senior architect Greg Houtaling, Engineering and Architectural Services. "With that, we also run steam-driven turbines to create electricity and chillers for cooling in the summer." |
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That squeezes twice the juice out of coal used for the stadium. Most plants simply burn coal to produce electricity using 30 to 35 percent of the total power in coal. The MSU's cogeneration process pulls about 60 percent of the power out of coal. Another environmental stride MSU's plant has taken is recycling the coal waste. The ash created from burning coal had been sent to landfills in the past. Since 1990, MSU has reused and sold hundreds of thousands of tons of ash for such uses as concrete and cement production, limiting the amount sent to landfills. Despite some environmental strides, emissions from coal-fired plants have people searching for healthier, cleaner alternatives. Even Michigan's gloomy days are being investigated for solar power. David Lankheet, owner of Sundu Solar, just installed a photovoltaic solar system for monitoring purposes at Western Michigan University. Four different types of panel sections were installed side by side for testing. The Spartan Stadium could benefit from a combination of wind and photovoltaic solar power, said Lankheet, because the sunny months are generally less windy, and vice versa. A one megawatt wind machine would be sufficient to generate enough power for the stadium, considering the sporadic nature of wind in the area, Lankheet said. This windmill running at a mere 15 percent of its capacity would generate 120 of the 124 megawatts consumed a month during the season, almost eliminating the need for the stadium's coal needs altogether. The downside: It would cost $3 million to $4 million to install. What's more, at more than 100 yards tall - and three times the height of Beaumont Tower, - it would dramatically alter the East Lansing skyline. "They make a big barn look really tiny," Lankheet said. The economic costs for moving to renewable energy have been a major hurdle. Supporters argue that an immediate and positive environmental effect is worth it, and in the long-run, it will be cheaper to depend mainly on renewable energy. "As far as costs in the long-run, renewables win hands-down," Gard said. "If you add up the costs that you pay as a citizen - costs like your current utility bill, medical bills for respiratory problems, cleaning up ecosystems, doctor bills for children with asthma - and compare it with what the cost would be for renewable energy, renewables win hands-down." |
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